In Zayn Malik’s ‘Mind of Mine,’ a Singer Eager to Reclaim Parts of Himself

Some of the most impassioned vocals on “Mind of Mine,” the solo debut of the One Direction dissident Zayn Malik, come on a modest mid-album interlude called “Flower.” The producer Malay plays a gentle folk-influenced guitar figure, and Mr. Malik exhales deeply atop it and then begins singing with deeply centered but controlled fervor, “Until the flower of this love has blossomed/Until this heart is at peace.” Then, three times, he pleads, “Give me your heart.”

“Flower” is the most plainly besotted song on this album. It is also sung in Urdu, the native language of Mr. Malik’s father. (The lyrics above are a rough translation.)

That Mr. Malik has inserted a 104-second Urdu love song into the middle of his album of sweaty, smooth R&B is a wink and also a feint — a quick, restrained nod to those in the know, who have been following him for years, that he hasn’t forgotten his past as a Muslim R&B-inclined singer trying to operate with dignity in the unforgiving, often choppy waters of pop’s mainstream.

From 2010 to 2015, he was part of the borg that was One Direction, perhaps the first postmodern boy band, but not one so disruptive that it allowed Mr. Malik to breathe. He was the band’s only nonwhite member — his father is of Pakistani descent — and also the one with the most evident interest in breaking loose from the group’s relentless big-tent pop.

“Mind of Mine” (RCA), out on Friday, March 25, shows a singer eager to reclaim the parts of himself that five years in the pop klieg lights forced into the shadows.

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The old days: Mr. Malik, center, as a member of One Direction.CreditChristie Goodwin/TriStar Pictures

For a group that was so specifically anodyne about its musical output, One Direction was always far more of a social proposition than a musical one. The group’s selling point was its rambunctiousness, and how its members were ill equipped for traditional choreographed boy-band maneuvers. Often the members looked lost onstage — in Mr. Malik’s case, sometimes the sentiment verged closer to frustration, or tension. (His hostility to boy-band cheer dated back to the “X Factor” auditions that brought One Direction together, when he walked out of a dance choreography session.)

Along with Harry Styles, Mr. Malik was the most signature voice in the group, but it was deployed only in short bursts. Any difference he wanted to display musically was sandpapered down. Nevertheless, thanks to One Direction’s huge success, Mr. Malik became one of the most visible pop stars of Asian descent working outside Asia.

Sometimes he embraced it — he speaks Urdu, and a short clip of Mr. Malik saying “I love you” in Urdu early in his One Direction years has almost half a million views on YouTube. And in 2014 he tweeted “#FreePalestine,” a young celebrity testing the political waters. But that tweet was met with death threats, and he has been more or less silent since then. Even when he won the award for outstanding achievement in music at the Asian Awards last year, he didn’t use his speech for anything more revealing than to thank his parents “for making me Asian, and for allowing me to have some sort of effect on the Asian community.”

In interviews, when asked about his heritage, or about being Muslim, he swats the questions away, in some combination of superstar cool and extreme pragmatism: He has a pulpit, but he doesn’t seen eager to use it.

“Mind of Mine” is, in part, a contemporary R&B album, a clear child of the haziness brought to the genre in recent years by the Weeknd and Frank Ocean. (Malay, who produced several songs on the album, has worked extensively with Mr. Ocean.) But there is also a familiar British restraint to Mr. Malik’s soul music: His singing is more certain than ever, but it has largely soft edges, and often it’s buried somewhat low in the mix as if it were of secondary importance to the sound. Which perhaps it is, because “Mind of Mine” is also, quietly, the product of someone fluent in pop mechanics; it is preoccupied with structure, perhaps the last residue left of his years making mercenary pop.

All that comes into play on “Pillowtalk,” the album’s first full song and first single, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released last month. It’s purposefully grand, with swelling rock-friendly production — not as far from One Direction as advertised. What’s most striking about it is Mr. Malik’s vocal cool. He’s a loose singer who achieves a lot without much power.

Throughout this album, Mr. Malik opts for a low-octane approach, with varying success. “It’s You” is an elegant whisper of a love song, part mellow soul burner and part post-Coldplay melancholia. (This is a combination he returns to on the bonus tracks “Blue” and “Golden.”) Similarly, “Drunk” is R&B delivered under a dark cloud, with its woozy imagery — “Late nights, red eyes, amnesia, I need you” — and its direct, almost spoken chorus, forgoing any vocal theatrics in favor of a casual nonchalance.

This mode serves Mr. Malik well over a wide range of musical approaches, like on “Fool for You,” a piano ballad that lands somewhere between Billy Joel and Jeffrey Osborne, or even “Tio,” the song here most clearly indebted to the Weeknd, with vocals like buried shrieks clamoring for freedom.

Occasionally, the viscosity of this album thins out and Mr. Malik is let loose to shimmy a little, like on the 1980s-esque “Lucozade,” or “Rear View,” which channels austere late-1980s-to-early-90s British R&B from Lisa Stansfield to Rick Astley. And “Wrong” is a winningly sensual duet with the rising American R&B singer Kehlani that recalls the crackle of Justin Timberlake’s early solo recordings. Almost all of these sounds are gestures that were effectively unavailable to Mr. Malik for the last five years.

The last time Mr. Malik was heard outside of the context of One Direction was in 2010, in his “X Factor” audition, and in a handful of amateur videos that still survive online. In them, he’s young. His voice is feeble. But his instincts are clear: He is a teenager obsessed with sweet, rhythmic R&B, the sort that sidesteps hip-hop — gently anguished songs like Mario’s “Let Me Love You,” Chris Brown’s “With You” and Ne-Yo’s “So Sick.”

Back then, Mr. Malik didn’t have the power or the subtlety to invest those performances with real authority, but a side benefit of five years of pop megafame is the P90X workout it affords your voice. So undoubtedly, Mr. Malik must have been thrilled at the opportunity to appear on the remix of Mr. Brown’s recent vibrant single “Back to Sleep,” which also features Usher — an invitation into the elite fraternity after years peering in from the outside. (Mr. Brown and Mr. Malik share a record label.)

He does not waste the moment. This is his crispest singing, hungrier than anything on his album. It’s also loud in the mix in the way he rarely is on the album. And you can hear Mr. Malik trying out several approaches to the lyrics. He starts out cool and reserved, then begins smearing out words with swagger: “Letsss notttt gettttt emotionalllll/Let’s be who we arrrrrrre.” A couple of lines later, he’s cramming syllables together: “Knowitsbeen a long day, itsbouttobe a long night.” In places, he deploys a touch of melisma — not as much as Mr. Brown or Usher, but more in one verse than in perhaps all of the One Direction catalog.

This performance — his highest-profile moment in this country apart from “Pillowtalk” — showcases Mr. Malik the bedroom R&B singer in a way that nothing on “Mind of Mine” quite does. He sounds cocksure, unburdened.

But American R&B has its own borders to protect, and its own means of racial erasing. While “Pillowtalk” has been a pop success here, it hasn’t made an impact on the world of R&B, either on the radio or the charts. And in recent weeks, when Funkmaster Flex, the late-night D.J. on Hot 97, has played the “Back to Sleep” remix, he’s name-checked Mr. Brown and Usher but not Mr. Malik. Sometimes, he just cuts the song off before getting to Mr. Malik’s verse — a new form of invisibility for a young singer all too accustomed to it.